O’Leary drops out of CPC race and throws support to Bernier

Kevin O’Leary dropped out of the federal Conservative leadership race to endorse Maxime Bernier on Wednesday.

He held a press conference late in the afternoon at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto to make it official.

Polls show O’Leary and Bernier as the first- and second-place candidates, so O’Leary’s endorsement of Bernier could be the decisive moment in the race.

“Like the other candidates, I have worked like hell on this campaign and I want the DNA of my policies and objectives to survive into the general election. The candidate that best mirrors my policies is Maxime Bernier,” O’Leary declared in a press release prior to the press conference.

“So here is what I’m going to do; I’m withdrawing my candidacy from the Leadership Race and throwing my full support behind Max. I’m going to do everything I can to ensure he gets elected, and I’m going to ask my supporters to do the same.”

O’Leary’s move comes a day after the party released the final membership numbers for the leadership race, which ends with the convention May 27 in Toronto.

The party announced Tuesday evening that there are now 259,010 members. Close observers say that O’Leary has not sold enough memberships to win.

“He sold 35,000 of 259,000, and that’s not enough for an outsider like him,” said a strategist for rival campaign. “If you’re running an insurgent campaign, you need 60,000, 70,000, 80,000. He has no second-ballot support.”

O’Leary told the Globe and Mail Wednesday morning that the number was larger than expected.

“We were surprised by the size of the list and I think most campaigns were, too.”

O’Leary, who does not speak French, said in his release that he has come to realize he can’t win seats in Quebec.

“There are 78 seats in Quebec, and the Conservative Party currently holds only 12 of them. In other words, the Liberals politically own Quebec. Without growing the Conservative base in Quebec, beating Trudeau in 2019 would be a huge challenge.

O’Leary and Bernier are discussing doing a tour of Canada together to promote Bernier’s candidacy.

Just over a month ago, Bernier called O’Leary “a loser” after O’Leary raised questions of membership fraud.

In the press conference Wednesday, O’Leary chalked that up to politics.

“He was critical during a campaign? Welcome to politics,” he said. “We’re in a civil war here.”

O’Leary, a businessman and reality TV star who spends much of his time in the United States, has been leading the race since he entered in January, but polls show he is vulnerable to a challenge from Bernier, who has more second- and third-ballot support in the race, which is being run using a preferential ballot.

On Wednesday afternoon, after he had decided to drop out and told the Globe and Mail of his decision, he was still seeking donations on his Twitter account.